Sad and thoughtful though this is, the poem is also a sudden reminder of how wonderful poetry can be. Thank you for placing it here. As I believe I've mentioned, our birds pretty much fly free, although within a large room. I think they're very happy, receive a great deal of company and maintain indecipherable (to us) but constant interaction with life outside the house. Their stage-to-stage hopping mostly occurs outside/on top of their cage, which is more home base than anything else. At the moment, they're singing along to "Forever" by Roy Wood. Curtis

Yes, Julia. The birds live in the room my wife uses as an office. It's both a peaceful and an active place. Tom: The birds are BIG Roy Wood fans. I think their favorite song of his, though, is Ball Park Incident (Wizzard). Obviously, they're compelled to listen to whatever is playing through the computer. To paraphrase the Chaz-Michael Michaels character in Blades of Glory, they haven't learned (yet) to "work the Google on the internet machine." The arrangement of photos here is eloquent. So is the caption, simple though it is, on the bottom picture. Curtis

Hardy's poem is, well, SO Hardy -- "a recent grave . . . a little cage/ That jailed a goldfinch. All was silent . . . its wistful eye,/ And once it tried to sing . . . No one knew anything." (The 'broken' meter of that last line gets it all -- the feeling, the broken heart.) Those European goldfinches sure are different from their American brethren, no?

The luminosity that oddly pervades (suffuses?) the gloom in the room is veritably numinous.

A wünderkamer with a magician teasing its gossamer cobwebs to float in the air, or an abandoned barn with a pitchfork being thrust into a shapeless form writhing in a burlap sack upon the bestial floor?

Is there ever not gloom in the Hardy room?

"Is there room in the room that you room in?" -- The House of Hardy, just another of poetry's many cobwebby, mouldy haunted mansions?

The issue of the sadness in Hardy being the distinguishing feature is brought up by Philip Larkin (a later poet who felt much sympathy with Hardy, though his own acute sadness was laced with a self-biting irony which probably would have appalled Hardy), in a comment I've just now cited toward the bottom of today's posting of Thomas Hardy:The Darkling Thrush.

But, "all that being said"... a little voice reminds me that we should remember too that for Hardy, as for (say) Williams, no observation was ever "too small" to make a poem of. So -- as has been pointed out in a comment as bright and sharp and sweet and sudden as a goldfinch's song, from the another room of gloom here in the house of galloping gloom, we can be pretty certain TH really did see that cage with a goldfinch in it, singing away bleakly there on that recent grave.

What's "real", anyway, really, in poetry, unless someone makes it so?

Was that gravedigger whose shadow is barely perceptible just out of the corner of the picture really Lon Chaney?

Did Williams Carlos Williams really see that wheelbarrow in the rain?

Did he really eat those plums?

Did TS Eliot really roll up his trouser cuffs, and eat a peach?

And who was that third who walked beside him, there, in the gloom, in the ice-fog?

Could it have been old Thomas Hardy, hiking out over the Downs on a gloomy, melancholy early winter morning poem hunt?

Over the several stages of our wanderings there has inevitably been a bird or two that, also foolishly wandering, has made its way into our places of habitation. There would then ensue a great panic of fluttering and flapping before the poor creature could be coaxed out a window (or, less happily, did itself in by injuring itself in its haste to get away).

I'm suffering from a bit of a permanently bent out of shape wing, myself, but perhaps I can make it flap about sufficiently to hunt and peck up a morsel from Marguerite Yourcenar's wonderful essay "On Some Lines from the Venerable Bede".

"... Asked to give his opinion on the introduction of a god named Jesus into Northumberland, this thane, whose name is unknown to us, broadened, as it were, the discussion:

"'The life of man on earth, My Lord, in comparison with the vast stretches of time about which we know nothing, seems to us to resemble the flight of a sparrow, who enters through a window in the great hall warmed by a blazing fire in the center of it where you feast with your councilors and liege men, while outside the tempests and snows of winter rage. And the bird swiftly sweeps through the great hall and flies out the other side, and after this brief respite, having come out of the winter, he goes back into it and is lost to our eyes. Such is the brief life of man, of which we know neither what goes before nor what comes after...'"

And Yourcenar comments on this -- which comes down from Bede's Latin prose via the rough Anglo-Saxon of Alfred -- as follows:

"For Christians, despite their belief in a blessed or infernal immmortality, what will follow after death (they pay little attention to what came before life) is perceived, above all, as eternal rest. Invideo, quia quiescunt, said Luther as he contemplated tombs. For this barbarian, in contrast, the bird issues from a storm and returns into a tempest; these lashings of rain and this wind-tossed snow in the Druidic night might make one think of the whirling of atoms or of the whirlwinds of forms in the Hindu Sutras. Between these two horrendous storms, the thane interprets the flight of the bird across the hall as a moment of respite (spatio serenitatis). That is quite surprising. Edwin's thane knew perfectly well that a bird which has flown into a house of men darts about madly, running the risk of dashing itself against those incomprehensible walls, of burning itself in the fire, or of being snapped up by the hounds lying next to the hearth. Life as we know it is hardly a moment of respite."

Don,

I must admit to the same serious lack of boundary-issues when it comes to Hardy.

Perhaps there is a twelve-step program for the likes of us.

But in the end... there we'll find ourselves, back with the glebe cow's drool, lapping it all up.